You'll Be Comin' Down Now, Baby
by cupcakeseaborn
Summary: Nick confronts Daisy on the streets of New York City a while after Gatsby's funeral. He's grief stricken and furious. Can be read as Jay/Nick if that's your lookout. Daisy bashing.


First story I've written for this website, hopefully you'll enjoy it. Title is from Bruce Springsteen's song of the same name.

 **Disclaimer: Daisy & Nick belong to the late F. Scott Fitzgerald.**

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The swish of her dress and the bouncing curls of her blonde hair gave her away. With a melancholy anger and a resignation in my bones I pulled her into a conversation with a call of her name and a step in the path of her clicking heels. Her eyes widened as she registered my presence blocking her from moving any further, and her full mouth paused in the middle of a friendly smile perhaps just realizing her mistake. Gatsby was a friend, and her betrayal of him, though it had not yet reached his ears before his bitter end, was a betrayal to me. He did not deserve what was forced upon him, and I couldn't help but trace the start of the slow fall of Jay Gatsby to his end all and be all: Daisy Buchanan. So when I saw her strutting casually down Fifth Avenue I could not reign in my anger or grief long enough to let her walk by a free woman.

"Nick," though spoken warily, her mask stayed secure, keeping me from peeking under it.

"He was alone, if that concerns you." I prodded, childishly, at a wound that I hoped was still there, and still raw.

"Nick-"

"Does it?" I paused stalling my tongue from lashing out. "Concern you, I mean.?" Her crystalline eyes shifted from innocent confusion to cold anger.

"He loved me, of course it does." She feigned a small smile to a curious passerby and brushed an unseen dust particle off my shoulder, the picture of casualness. For all her fidgeting I couldn't see the quiet grief that festered in the back of my mind and flooded my body still today reflected in her, where it should be. It could be the mask, or she was never in grieving..

"His funeral was attended by a mere three people, myself included." I moved closer to her, curling my fingers around her frail arm. I kept my voice free of contempt and the righteousness I felt. The wind whipping around us created a bubble from the rest of the crowded street and caused Daisy's intricately decorated skirt to flutter delicately. I was surprised at the irrational anger that welled up within me, the skirt was new, perhaps expensive, each individual stitch seemed to gleam with opulence. Gatsby would no longer have the luxury of fine fabrics and sparkling jewels, he wasn't moving forward or reaching for the future he was in the ground. My only solace was the realization that Tom and Daisy would be frozen in time on their diamond encrusted pedestals, and they would only have each miserable other.

"Oh Nick, I was still so broken up about it." Her voice tinkled like bells, wafting through the sound of Autumn traffic and just barely reaching my ears. Her eyes were dewy and she sniffled prettily. If it were another time I would have stopped the onslaught of accusations and my anger would in part fizzle out, but I couldn't stop. However little, Gatsby deserved some justice.

"He loved you, enough to try to make a future with you."

"He wanted the past, I can't be the Daisy I was before Tom. As pleasurable as it would be for me to forget it, there was a time and place where I loved Tom." Daisy dropped the hand that momentarily held her delicate chin. "I loved them both, Nick. More than anything, but Gatsby couldn't force me to pick between the future and the past."

Her point was made brutally and like most revelations about Daisy, it was a wallop to the face. She wasn't convincing, but I felt like my point was made in full. There was nothing more I could say without being needlessly hurtful. I wanted to pursue it further, but there wasn't much I could do short of yelling.

"Alright then," I started to retreat from the conflict, "have a nice day," Daisy caught me the same way I did her; calling my name desperately and catching up to my pace; heading in the direction from which I'd come.

"Don't blame me for this, Nick. It was Tom! Tom didn't know Gatsby was innocent! He said those things to that woman's husband, because he didn't know I-." She had murdered Myrtle. And if Tom told George Wilson who was driving the car, who he thought was driving the car...

"You are both murderers." I said this loudly enough for a woman in a knitted cap and a scowl to glare viciously at us; I lowered my voice to a publicly appropriate tone, "Gatsby had a future he built for himself and, by a cruel trick of fate, you. He was a good man." I caught myself about to say "honest" but I remembered that wasn't his strong suit nor his appeal. His appeal was that he built his empire with his own two hands, with some help from Wolfsheim and Dan Cody albeit, but he still crawled his way up from the Midwest with patches on his knees and dirt on his face and a dream for his future. One that he eventually achieved.

"Nick I..." Her voice was drowned out by a particularly loud engine revving in the radius of our place on the sidewalk, I didn't want to hear what she had to say anyway.

"I can't, for the life of me, figure out why you let him go after everything that transpired. If you never talk to me again, Daisy, answer my question, why stay with Tom?"

Daisy blinked back what looked like tears, but I couldn't be sure. It might have just been caused by the weather. She glanced away from me and forced herself to look at an increasingly damp sidewalk. The dew drop pearls in her ears shook along with her head, like she was attempting to make sense of it herself.

"I want to be a beautiful fool." At those words my face fell and my heart pounded against its cage of bone, between the broken shards of her words and the tear that caressed her face. My anger dissipated.

"Well, you've got what you've wanted, Daisy."


End file.
